Amidst all the AI hype and discourse, I keep feeling sad knowing I’ll never get to be the sort of programmer I hoped to be. My entire career — assuming I even get to have one that lasts beyond the next few years — is going to be defined by AI. The way I spend my days has little in common with the expectations I developed throughout my pre-2022 life.

Sure, maybe I’ll do more, faster, but it’s not really mine, it’s detached, delegated, understood only as much as I minimally need to in order to spin up the next agent on the next linear ticket. There are no more quiet moments deeply mulling over a few vital lines, there’s no more ‘blue-collar’ programming where you spend hours tapping away through smoothly-flowing boilerplate. To the extent human-sized problems still exist, the specter of AI looms over them — will claude be able to oneshot this in six months?

In many ways, my job is easier than I ever hoped it would be. But it’s not the job I spent my entire youth wanting. That job is gone, that world is gone, and I’m not sure how to mourn it.